Last Night by Brendan Lemon A Novel

Jack Webster will, more than likely, die tomorrow. In the hot Cuban morning, his life will be eaten away by bullets from a firing squad, punishment for the murder of a teenage boy. Late at night, alone in his cell in a decaying Havana prison, the young American begins to write a letter. In impassioned fragments, he struggles with his own memories to create an accounting for his young Cuban lover that will cut through the lies the two have been forced to tell about each other, and that will help Jack himself reach a state of clarity, if not peace. As his final night slides with terrifying speed towards morning and death, Jack's letter becomes a longer and longer search, as much to find vindication as to explain how a passionate and spontaneous love-begun with such promise in an embassy party in New York and brought to full realization in the complex mix of tensions, repressions, and celebrations of Castro's Cuba-devolved so completely into a stew of obsession, jealousy, violence, and death. As Jack struggles to justify himself to his beloved Garcia, a realization breaks simultaneously with the dawn, a realization that might allow him a measure of final peace, if he only had the time to understand it more fully. Rich in language and vibrantly evocative, Webster's remarkable narrative as imagined by first time novelist Brendan Lemon captures with aching clarity and sensuality the universal drama of love won and lost.